Athletic activity is important to maintaining a healthy lifestyle and is a source of entertainment for many people.
Individuals engaged in athletic activities have sought aids to help with pacing and coaching during running workouts. Typical methods include running on circular tracks of known lengths and employing a stop watch to record intervals or calculate speed. When a running event, such as a race, requires assistance to set a particular pace, other runners may be enlisted to aid in the effort and maintain a consistent pace. In a race environment these runners may be called “rabbits” and are often paid to run only a portion of the race to ensure a fast opening pace.
In more recent years runners have employed additional tools in an effort to assist in tracking and coaching workouts. For example, GPS and accelerometer based devices may be used to provide speed and distance information. Fitness monitoring devices have also been developed that are capable of recording information about an individual's performance during an athletic activity using sensors, and in some cases providing feedback about the individual's performance. Some fitness monitoring devices employ sensors attached to the individual's body, while other fitness monitoring devices rely on sensors attached to a piece of athletic equipment. Such sensors may be capable of measuring various physical and/or physiological parameters associated with the individual's physical activity.
An individual engaged in an athletic activity—or an interested observer such as a coach or fan—may desire to receive information about the athletic activity, including information about the individual's performance. But with respect to providing this information, existing athletic/fitness activity monitoring, training, and coaching systems suffer from a number of drawbacks. Many existing systems are limited in the amount of feedback or coaching that they can give. Other systems may provide coaching feedback during the activity, but in a way that distracts that individual or interested observer from focusing on the ongoing athletic activity itself. And many existing systems do not provide physical targets for individuals to react to, or an adequate substitute for a training partner. These systems are not suitable for monitoring in many real world athletic competitive or training sessions. Finally, existing athletic activity monitoring, training, and coaching systems often fail to provide the individual or interested observer with quick, accurate, insightful information that would enable them to easily compare past performances, develop strategies for improving future performances, or visualize performances.